Thursday, February 5, 2015

Girl Altar Servers?

The girl altar server debate is raging again in the wake of the news from San Francisco that a parish pastor has decided that only boys can serve at his parish. After reading this article in Crux, I have been giving the issue some thought. Some of the girls who
have served at the altar for me over the last 5 years have been very positively
impacted by the experience and have been very reverent and capable
servers. Serving has given them a unique
understanding of the liturgy and an opportunity to get to know their priests.

This is also why it is such an important ministry for those
called to the priesthood to be involved in. As the vocation director for our diocese, I encourage every boy or young man to serve at Mass. Boys and young men are able to encounter the priesthood in a very unique
and powerful way as servers, and many times this either opens the door to a
priestly vocation, or opens that door more.

For this reason, I have heard some people recently state that allowing women to
serve somehow is part of a broader movement that will eventually press for women to be become priests. The idea seems to be that since it is only
priests who rightly belong in the sanctuary, if we let women in there we
should watch out because soon they will be clamoring to be ordained! But I'm not sure how we can claim that
the sanctuary is only the place for priests and those destined to become
them. The Church has opened the
sanctuary to the ministry of non-priests, provided that they minister as lay
persons and do not attempt to take on a clerical role.

Today women serve as readers, Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion, and sacristans - all of which are important liturgical ministries.

There has been a lot of confusion and debate over liturgical ministry since
the council. What roles within the
sanctuary are specifically clerical?
What roles are open to all of the baptized? We went from a time when almost all
activities in the sanctuary were carried out by clerics to a time when it was
claimed that the cleric was only needed for the consecration. I think most Catholics now understand that
this was a mistake. The impoverishment of priestly liturgical ministry and
the amplification of lay liturgical ministry into what Pope Francis calls a "lay clericalism" turned the Church in on itself and proved disastrous for priestly vocations.

Recent years have seen a gradual movement to once again reserve to clerics many aspects of liturgy that had in some cases
been widely delegated to laity after the council. The most common reason given is that there
were widespread liturgical abuses - although in many cases priests were
complicit in committing them. But I think another reason also drives the effort to shift liturgical ministry back toward clerics. There has been a renewed desire to recover
the sacredness of the liturgy. When
everyone and their mother in law is tramping around the sanctuary it is hard to
understand how it is a sacred place. Sacred
places tend to be reserved, set apart, protected. You take off your sandals, cover your head,
lower your eyes in an act of worship, acknowledging God’s authority and rule
over you. The priest is the one set apart to go in there, to be the guardian of the sanctuary, the one whose responsibility it is to ensure
that the sacredness of the space and the liturgy is maintained. And so the desire to recover the sacredness
of the liturgy often goes hand and hand with efforts to reserve greater
portions of liturgical ministry to clerics.

I've been in parishes for a number of years - and I will say
without a doubt that one of the most difficult things a priest does in our
post-conciliar age is to ensure that laity who minister in the sanctuary are
properly trained and prepared to carry out their ministry in a way that is reverent and reflects the sacred. In my experience, many times they are
not. All too often, linens
are treated like napkins, hosts carted to and fro like candy, sacred books and vessels
banged around, scriptures proclaimed incoherently, and sacristies and sanctuaries filled with small talk. In the face of this kind of malformation,
it is tempting to just kick everyone out.
And there have been times, times when I have had enough – when I have,
in a hopefully not too exasperated tone, asked Extraordinary Ministers to please
clear out of the sacristy to sit with their families and pray or asked
sacristans to give me some time to prepare without peppering me with questions. In some ways, it would be much easier and safer to remove
almost all lay ministry from the liturgy.
If the only goal were to ensure the sacredness of the sanctuary, then
the safest solution would be for the priest to offer Mass with one server, reading the scriptures and distributing communion himself.

Yet the desire to protect the sacredness of the sanctuary and
the liturgy does not justify reserving them to clerics and clerics alone. I don't make that statement easily, because I
have seen sacristies and liturgies in disarray, I have seen abuses first hand
and have suffered through trying to correct them countless times.

But we must ask: what is the purpose of the
Mass? The Mass is not merely a time for
God to enter into the sanctuary of the Church and be worshiped. No, Jesus complicated things. He insisted on each of us becoming his
sanctuaries, his tabernacles. The Mass
is the wedding banquet, when Christ invites his people to come and to offer
their lives in union with him through the holy sacrifice of the Mass, and then
to receive from him the gift of new life in the Eucharist. To receive who they are and become who they receive. And in this fallen world, many times this banquet is
a messy business. People come from the highways
and byways – maybe they have their wedding garment but it is often tattered and
disheveled and they have come with mixed intentions and purposes. The music is out of tune and babies yell and
old people fart and teenagers snicker. Readings are mispronounced (my personal favorite at funerals is "Yet is their hope full of immorality"), sacristans don't turn on the sound system, servers fidget and yawn... It is a challenge to retain a sense of the sacred in the midst of a
fallen world, with so many tabernacles wandering around the sanctuary like
sheep in a pasture.

The tendency that I have seen, when approaching lay liturgical ministry, is to go to one of two extremes: to
either follow the path of lukewarm pedestrianism, abandoning the effort to
retain the sacred altogether; or to follow the path of distant protectionism, insisting
that the hoi polloi keep back and leave the work to a small number of clerics and clerical proteges. The two extremes end up falling into the same
trap: neither is truly pastoral. The good shepherd doesn't sit and protect the
pasture, waiting for the sheep to find it.
But nor does he start tearing down its fences, which he knows are there
to protect the flock. No, he goes out
and leads his sheep into the pasture, into the sanctuary, and personally shows
them where to find shelter and rest, shows them how to find and worship God,
how to be reverent and how to find the sacred in the midst of a messy world.

There is a strict correlation between holiness and the
sanctuary for Catholics – it cannot be otherwise. As long as the sanctuary is the place where
Jesus Christ becomes present once more - body, blood, soul, and divinity – in the
Eucharist, it cannot be held that it is just one sacred place among many. No, the sanctuary, the liturgy is the green
pasture. In the liturgy we meet Christ
and are fed by him. To be distant from
the liturgy, from the Mass, is to be distant from Christ. This does not mean that there cannot be love
and grace outside of the liturgy. There is
love between spouses separated by an ocean.
But they still feel the distance, and because of their love for one
another they feel it more profoundly.
This is the same for a Catholic – their love for Christ makes them
desire to be with him, and they know that they are no closer to him than when
they receive him in Holy Communion.

Christ chose the twelve, whom he called apostles. He gave them a specific role and
ministry. But this did not entail him
keeping the women who loved him at arm’s reach!
They cooked for him, cried with him, washed his feet, kept vigil during
his passion, washed and cared for his body, and were the first to greet him
when he rose from the dead. That did not
make them apostles, and they knew that did not make them apostles and they had
no desire to be apostles! But they knew
that apostles were not the only ones who were close to Jesus – because of their
intimacy with him, they knew that he had a special love and affection for them.

It is critical that young women today experience intimacy
with Christ in a non-apostolic way, in the way that the women who traveled with
him knew and loved him. And I believe
that serving at the altar, like other liturgical ministries, lends itself toward this type of intimacy and does
not in any way detract from the ability of boys and young men to come to know
and revere the apostolic ministry of the priest.

A couple of personal caveats and practical considerations:

While I do not think that the presence of girls serving
alongside them discourages boys from serving, if the number of girls serving
surpasses the number of boys or if the adult server coordinators are all women,
there is a clear tendency for the number of boys to drop off to almost
nothing. This seems to be a sociological
fact more than anything. For this
reason, it is important, I think, to ensure that there is an equal or greater
number of boys who serve at each Mass.
In some cases, where there are many girls who wish to serve, this will
mean that they serve less frequently than boys.

Also, in some parishes there has been a tendency to prematurely
clericalize altar servers. It is
inappropriate, to my mind, for a young child of either sex to wear a black
cassock with surplice, and certainly for girls or young women. This is the vesture of a cleric at Mass. In many churches there are large supplies of
black cassocks and surplices and a long tradition of girls wearing them – that is
hard to change right away. Many priests
have either had female servers wear albs or have dressed all servers in red
cassocks, which is also traditional, but not specifically clerical attire. It is appropriate for older young men or
seminarians to wear a black cassock and surplice, however, because there is (hopefully)
a stronger tie between them and the clerical state.

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About Me

is a parish priest sharing thoughts on God, life, and culture with parishioners, family, friends and others.
Father Seamus was ordained for the Diocese of Portland, Maine on June 29th, 2007 and received his Licentiate in Dogmatic Theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in June of 2008. He now serves as the Vocation Director for the Diocese of Portland and as Chaplain for St. Dominic Academy in Lewiston/Auburn.